Did you know? Digital Realty Trust uses more renewable energy than any other data center provider, followed by Equinix, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s new data.

Companies that use providers like Digital and Equinix are increasingly interested in data center services powered by renewable energy, partly because of their own corporate sustainability programs and partly because energy generated by sources like wind and solar has gotten a lot cheaper in recent years. In response, the providers have been sourcing more renewables to address the demand.

So do you think that your messages are safe? Maybe Almost but we have reports that Amnesty International has singled out Snapchat and Skype among other companies for failing to adopt basic privacy protection in its Message Privacy Ranking, released this week. The ranking pits 11 popular messaging services against each other, with Facebook coming out the big winner.

Can you believe it?Companies were ranked based on their recognition of online threats to human rights, default deployment of end-to-end encryption, user disclosure, government disclosure, and publishing of the technical details of their encryption.

A serious vulnerability named Dirty COW has been discovered recently which has put the Linux kernel under risk. Its said that this vulnerability was noticed nine years ago (since version 2.6.22 in 2007) and remained unnoticed throughout this time. A researcher named Phil Oester was the man behind the detection of this serious threat.

According to him, the vulnerability is described as a race condition where the Linux kernel’s memory subsystem handles the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings. In this way, the attackers gain write access to read-only memory updates and this paves way to their increased privileges on the system. Continue reading…